August 13, 2012 "Information
Clearing House" -- FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE
Madeleine Albright should be a happy camper: Another
campaign of sanctions and embargoes by the US is about to
start killing children, this time in Iran.

Albright, as
President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, when
interviewed on CBS’s news magazine program “60 Minutes” back
in 2000, was asked by reporter Lesley Stahl about reports
that US sanctions on Iraq had led to the deaths of some
500,000 Iraqi children because of shortages of medicine and
things like chlorine for treating water supplies. Stahl
asked Albright if such a dreadful toll was “worth it.”
Albright famously responded, “I think this is a very
hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Albright must
be happy then that apparently the same kind of heartless
logic is at work once more, this time orchestrated by the
Obama administration and the current Secretary of State,
It Takes a Village author and self-styled child
advocate Hillary Clinton.

According to a
letter sent to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon by the head
of Iran’s Charity Foundation for Special Diseases, the
current US-led sanctions campaign against Iranian financial
institutions and efforts to prevent western banks from doing
business with Iran have made it next to impossible for
Iranian doctors and hospitals to obtain medicines from
abroad for such relatively rare but serious diseases as
hemophilia, Multiple sclerosis (MS), various cancers, kidney
failure and thalassemia.

The tightening
of international screws on Iranian financial transactions
has also made it hard for domestic makers of some of these
medicines in Iran to obtain the raw materials needed to
manufacture needed medicines locally, according to the
letter.

Fatemeh Hashemi
Rafsanjani, the author of the letter, called on the
secretary general to act to prevent the sanctions campaign
from harming an estimated 6 million Iranians who suffer from
these diseases. She said that the sanctions had already
“directly affected the lives and well-being of thousands of
patients.”

The US-led
campaign to squeeze Iran economically is an effort to
pressure the Iranian public to make their country’s leaders
shut down a completely legal effort to develop a domestic
nuclear fuel enrichment program.

Iranians
suffering from cancer, MS, kidney disease or other diseases
— many of them children — are reportedly being prevented
from getting needed medicines because of a fear by Israel
and its backer, the US, that Iran’s nuclear program
might lead in the future to Iran’s developing a nuclear
bomb capability, becoming the second nuclear nation in the
Middle East, ending Israel’s nuclear monopoly.

Although US
intelligence services concede that there is no evidence that
Iran is currently trying to develop a nuclear bomb, the
possibility that this might happen in the future is
apparently justification enough for threatening the lives of
critically ill Iranian citizens.

The US
sanctions on Iran will no doubt also create problems for
victims of Iran’s latest disaster — a pair of earthquakes,
6.4 and 6.3 on the Richter Scale, which struck in the
country’s northwestern region Saturday, killing several
hundred people and leaving over 16,000 homeless. Hospitals,
some of them damaged, were reportedly overcrowded and were
struggling to obtain medicines. The US, through its USAID
program, sent in a planeload of supplies–bottled water,
blankets “personal hygiene kits” — to Tehran, which
Washington valued at $350,000, and also provided another
$50,000 through the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies,
but that aid is a pittance compared to the supplies that are
being deliberately blocked by sanctions-related constraints
on Iranian international payments.

No one should
be surprised by this ruthless victimization of children and
the sick by Washington in the name of realpolitik.
In Cuba, following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the
early 1990s, there was an
epidemic of blindness and vision damage among children
because of the inability of Cuba, the subject of a
decades-long US trade embargo, to obtain necessary food and
especially vitamin A.

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